Half a Life Read Online Free

that term. No words spoken, no meeting of any sort outside the tea-shop, yet a special kind of relationship established. We began to get strange looks in the tea-shop, and I began to get those looks even when I was on my own. The girl was mortified. I could see that she didn't know how to deal with those judging eyes. But what mortified her gave me a strange satisfaction. I looked upon that kind of judgement—from waiters, students, simple people—as the first sweet fruit of my life of sacrifice. They were only the first fruits. I knew that there were going to be greater battles ahead, severer tests, and even sweeter fruit.
    The first of those battles was not long in coming. One day in the tea-room the girl spoke to me. I had got used to the silence between us—it seemed a perfect way of communication—and this forwardness in someone I had thought of as backward took me by surprise. Mixed up with this surprise was my dismay at her voice. I realised then that in the class, even at the time of her trouble with the professor over Hamlet, I had only heard her mumble. Her voice, heard in this intimate way across the little square tea-table, was not soft and shy and aiming at sweetness, as you might have expected from someone so small and slight and diffident, but loud and coarse and rasping. It was the kind of voice I associated with people of her kind. I thought it might have been something that as a scholarship girl she had left behind.
    I hated that voice as soon as I heard it. I felt, not for the first time, that I was sinking. But that was the terror that went with the life of sacrifice I had committed myself to, and I felt I had absolutely to go ahead.
    I was so preoccupied with these thoughts—her forwardness, the hatefulness of her voice (like an expression of her big white top teeth and her powdered dark skin), my fear for myself—that I had to ask her to say again what she had said.
    She said, “Somebody has told my uncle.”
    Uncle? I felt she had no right to be dragging me into these unsavoury depths. Who was this uncle? What hole did he live in? Even the word “uncle”—which was a word that other people used of a sometimes precious relationship—was presumptuous.
    I said, “Who is this uncle?”
    “He is with the Labourers Union. A firebrand.”
    She used the English word, and it sounded very strange and acrid in her mouth. We didn't have nationalist politics in the state—it wasn't allowed by the maharaja—but we did have this semi-nationalist subterfuge, which found pretty words, like “labourers” or “workers,” for the uglier words that were in everyday use. And, all at once, I knew who she might be. She would have been related to the firebrand, and this would have explained her getting the scholarship from the maharaja. In her own eyes she was a person of power and influence, someone on the rise.
    She said, “He says he is going to take out a procession against you. Caste oppression.”
    That would have suited me down to the ground. It would have made a public statement of my rejection of old values. It would have broadcast my adherence to the ideas of the mahatma, my life of sacrifice.
    She said, “He says he is going to take out a procession and burn your house down. The whole world has seen you sitting with me in this tea-house week after week. What are you going to do?”
    I was really frightened. I knew those firebrands. I said, “What do you think I should do?”
    “You have to hide me somewhere, until things calm down.”
    I said, “But that would be kidnapping you.”
    “It is what you have to do.”
    She was calm. I was like a drowning man.
    A few short months before I had been an ordinary, idle young man at the university, the son of a courtier, living in my father's Grade C official house, thinking about the great men of our country and yearning to be great myself, without seeing any way, in the smallness of our life, of embarking on that career of greatness, capable only of